From a culture of me to a culture of we

Did you know on average a power drill is only used for 12 minutes during its entire lifetime? And actually it is the hole you want, and not the drill! In this inspiring TED talk, Rachel Botsman explains how the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies will transform business, consumerism and the way we live.

Around 2008 we hit the wall when Mother Nature and the market said ‘no more’ to hyper consumption. Four key drivers initiated this: - A renewed belief in the importance of community - A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies - Pressing unresolved environmental concerns - A global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors.

These key drivers have fusion together, creating a shift from hyper consumption to collaborative consumption.

Nowadays sharing initiatives are popping up around us, on different scales and with diverse purposes. However they can roughly be divided in to three areas: - Redistributing markets: moving a product from where it isn’t being used to somewhere it is, this way stretching the lifestyle of products and reducing waste. - Collaborative lifestyles: sharing things like money, skills, or time. A nice example is Landshare where people passionate about growing vegetables are gardening are connected with people who have land to share. - Product service systems: where you pay for the benefits of a product without owning it. Such services work well for things with a high idling capacity such as tools, cars and baby goods.

Rachel explains how technology is removing the middleman and enabling peer-to-peer sharing. Something that actually has always been in our human instincts. But how does the trust mechanism works? By creating a trial on the Internet we are signaling whether we can be trusted or not. Reputation capital is becoming a new social currency determining our access to collaborative consumption.

Rachel Botsman is on a mission to make sharing cool again. Watch her TED talk to hear the full story and learn how collaborative consumption can even be good for your health!